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The Debate is Over
I'm a sucker for the History Channel's disaster shows. So when they advertised "Last Days on Earth" seven ways the world could end, I set my DVR and got the popcorn ready. The topic was not really the destruction of Earth, but the extinction of man. The seven causes were (1) Rogue Black Hole (2) Artificial Intelligence (3) Supervolcano (4) Asteroid Strike (5) Nuclear War (6) Plague & (7) Climate Change. A Gamma Ray burst in our galactic neighborhood was also discussed.
The show was two hours long. By the end of the first hour they had breezed through the astrological and geological threats, and glossed over AI. They were discussing a man-made plague as the last half hour approached. A Soviet scientist named Popov discussed how easy it would be to make a 100% lethal strain of smallpox.
Having spent my childhood knowing that the mystery had to be solved in the last 10 minutes of the show, or it would be a "to be continued" two-part episode, I was wondering how they would fill out the last half hour of the show when they had spent no more than seven minutes on the first seven causes. The last putative disaster was "climate change." How this would kill off man kind I couldn't imagine. Modern humans have lived through times both significantly hotter and colder than today or what is forecast for the near future. Sea levels have risen hundreds of feet since the end of the last ice-age.
Then the host, a woman sitting at a desk, pretending to be a news-anchor, switched to a clip of - you guessed it - Al Gore. The hostess asks this leading compound question:
"Is there any doubt among scientists that global warmth is occurring, that it is dangerous, and that humans are causing it?"
Gore replies:
"No. The Debate is over."
He then continues, as the hostess looks, head tilted, in mock concern, to blame "big business" for staging the "illusion of debate" in the same way that the tobacco companies hired scientists to testify before congress that nicotine is not addictive.
This entire show had been a pretext for a half-hour puff-piece infomercial for Al Gore! No historical context of climate variation was given. The relative contribution of human versus natural sources of CO2 was not mentioned. It was asserted that we must do "something." What that "something" was was not mentioned. But the certainty that man-made global warming was the most certain of these "seven ways the world would end" was echoed by all the usual hacks - Michio Kaku, a theoretical "string-theory" physicist, noted for his best-selling books, his lack of concrete accomplishments in physics, and the fact that he is not Caucasian, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, noted for getting Pluto demoted from planethood status, his grandiose self-importance, his lack of concrete accomplishments in Astronomy, and the fact that he is not Caucasian.
Yes, the world will end. If Al Gore gets his way.
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